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Posts Tagged ‘cancer-research’

Researchers from The University of Manchester and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust — both part of Manchester Cancer Research Centre — say the test could be developed and used in hospitals within the next few years.

It would mean medics could see which patients could benefit from blood vessel-targeting drugs — such as bevacizumab — in addition to conventional therapy. Meanwhilehile others who are not going to benefit would be spared the time and side effects associated with having the drug.

The test would also help to reduce the cost to the NHS. Ovarian cancer has seen little increase in survival rates over the last few decades and scientists are seeking new treatment strategies to improve the standard approach of surgery and chemotherapy.

A recent advance has been to target the development of new blood vessels within the tumor — preventing the cancer from receiving the nutrients it needs to grow. Bevacizumab, one of the blood vessel-targeting drugs, has shown significant but modest improvements in patient survival so doctors are seeking ways to predict which patients are most likely to gain an advantage from this type of drug.

The research team looked at blood samples from patients enrolled in an international trial of bevacizumab. These patients received either standard chemotherapy treatment alone or chemotherapy plus the blood vessel-targeting drug.

Professor Gordon Jayson, Professor of Medical Oncology at The University of Manchester and Honorary Consultant at The Christie who jointly led the study, said: “We are keen to identify predictive biomarkers — measures that can indicate how well a patient will respond to treatment — so we can better target these drugs to patients most likely to benefit.”We investigated levels of a range of proteins in patients’ pre-treatment blood samples to see if any were associated with improved survival.”

The findings, published recently in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, show that two particular proteins — Ang1 and Tie2 — could be used in combination to predict patient response. Patients with high levels of Ang1 and low levels of Tie2 were most likely to benefit from bevacizumab.

Both these proteins are involved in controlling the formation of new blood vessels. Conversely, they found that patients with high levels of both proteins did not benefit from the additional drug.

Study co-author Professor Caroline Dive, from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute based at The University of Manchester, added: “We will now look to further explore the potential of using a blood test to personalise treatment for ovarian cancer patients.

Moving towards a more individualized treatment plan specific for each patient and their particular tumor is key to improving outcomes for patients while sparing those unlikely to benefit from potential side effects of therapy.”

Standard treatment for locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer is a combination of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Traditionally this is planned in a one-size-fits-all manner but the radiation dose may not always be enough to stop tumor growth.

The potential to increase the radiation dose to the cancerous tissue varies between patients and depends on the size and location of the tumor in relation to sensitive organs such as the spinal cord and lungs. Now researchers at The University of Manchester and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust — both part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre — have looked at ways to personalize and increase the dose to the tumor while minimizing the effect on healthy tissue.

Dr Corinne Faivre-Finn, researcher at The University of Manchester and Honorary Consultant at The Christie, who led the study, said: “Current standard options for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer are associated with poor survival. We wanted to see if more advanced methods of planning and delivering radiotherapy treatment could potentially allow an increase in radiation dose.”

The group used data from 20 lung cancer patients to investigate whether a newer radiotherapy technique — intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) — could potentially be used to increase the radiation dose to lung tumors, without harming healthy organs.

Their treatment planning methods ensured a safe radiation dose was delivered to the surrounding organs at risk. In an article recently published in the journal Clinical Oncology, they show that IMRT allowed an increase in radiation dose for non-small cell lung cancer.

“Our exploratory study suggests that using IMRT can allow radiation dose to be increased: calculations indicate that this could yield a 10% improvement in tumor control. We are starting a new clinical trial, funded by Cancer Research UK, investigating the delivery of this personalised IMRT treatment in patients with non-small cell lung cancer. We hope to demonstrate that the increase dose delivered to the tumor will lead to improved survival ” added Dr Faivre-Finn.

The findings, set out in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are based on the experience of more than 2,000 young women in England and Wales treated for the cancer over a period of more than 40 years.

Previous research has suggested that women with Hodgkin lymphoma who receive certain types of chemotherapy or radiotherapy are at increased risk of going through the menopause early — but there was insufficient information to provide patients with detailed advice.

But the new study, led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, provides precise estimates of risk for women depending on which treatment types and doses they received and at what age — allowing doctors to give them detailed advice about their risks of future infertility.

The research was largely funded by Breakthrough Breast Cancer and involved researchers from across the UK at more than 50 universities and hospitals.

The research team followed-up 2,127 women who had been treated for Hodgkin lymphoma in England and Wales between 1960 and 2004, and who had been aged under 36 at the time. All had received treatment with chest radiotherapy, sometimes alongside other treatments.

Some 605 of the women in the study underwent non-surgical menopause before the age of 40. This was a large enough number for the researchers to estimate accurate risks of menopause at different ages, depending on the mixture and doses of treatments they received and the age they received them.

The researchers produced a risk table which could help improve the advice that clinicians are able to give to women who have undergone treatment for the disease. Several of the treatments caused a sharp increase in premature menopause risk.

For example, a woman who had received six or more cycles of a standard chemotherapy regimen in her late 20s, but without receiving radiotherapy to the pelvic area, had a chance of around 18 per cent of undergoing menopause by the age of 30, or 58 per cent by age 40.

Overall, risk of premature menopause was more than 20-fold raised after ovarian radiotherapy, and also after some specific chemotherapy regimens. Risk of menopause by age 40 was 81 per cent after receiving ovarian radiotherapy at an overall dose of 5 or more Grays, and up to 75 per cent after chemotherapy, depending on the type, although only one per cent after receiving a chemotherapy regimen called ABVD.

“Hodgkin lymphoma often affects younger women, and although fortunately most survive the disease, treatments including certain types of chemotherapy and pelvic radiotherapy can lead to premature menopause.

“We hope our study will help women to understand better, in consultation with their doctors, their risks of future infertility following treatment for this malignancy. By looking in a much larger group of women than previous studies of this type, we were able to produce age and treatment specific risk estimates that we hope will be of practical use to individual women. I’m extremely grateful to the patients and doctors who made it possible for us to produce this information.”